Making work work for women
Of the 1.4 billion working-age women around the globe, only 34 percent are in the workforce, according to data presented by Suhani Jalota, MBA '22, PhD '24, at the inaugural Future of Work for Women Summit co-hosted by the Stanford King Center on Global Development on April 18.
Jalota thinks the world can do better and that, if so, companies will do better as well.
The summit was conceived by Jalota, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, which also co-hosted the event along with Myna Mahila, an organization Jalota created to empower women in their health and finance decisions.
The problem of low labor force participation among women in developing countries is well-documented, as are the reasons, including: safety concerns and travel costs, housework and child responsibilities, lack of information about opportunities, social norms, and disapproval from male relatives and community members. Jalota is intimately familiar with the issues: She launched Myna Mahila in India as an undergraduate student; her dissertation at Stanford, where she earned her PhD in health policy and economics, was based on a randomized experiment she designed to compare the uptake of office and remote jobs among Indian women who were previously not part of the labor force.
Led by Myna Mahila, the Future of Work for Women Initiative aims to integrate 100 million women into the workforce by 2040 in low- and middle-income countries by bringing stakeholders—including academics, civil society organizations, governments, private companies, the financial industry, and philanthropists—together on solutions.
"People recognize that cross-sector collaboration is important, but they don't know what to do about it," Jalota says.
In the leadup to the summit, Jalota and her co-organizers, including Myna Mahila USA board member Sakshi Shah, facilitated conversations about women in the workforce with 25 private companies, including IBM, Walmart, and Hyundai; information from those conversations then informed a pre-summit report that describes some of the strategies those companies have used to recruit and retain women.
The summit was also designed to align what can be the seemingly divergent incentives of the necessary stakeholders: governments want to increase GDP, private companies want to increase profits and productivity, investors want returns, philanthropists want to fund causes they care about, and civil society organizations may want to empower historically underrepresented or marginalized communities.
Some potential solutions in the report and discussed at the event include flexible or remote work arrangements; interventions that encourage men to share in household responsibilities; government-subsidized maternity leave, childcare, and transportation to and from work; and training women in industry-relevant skills.
Jalota shared the results of her own research showing that women were far more likely to accept work-from-home jobs than in-office positions; based on her experiment involving 3,200 women in Mumbai, 56 percent of the women offered work-from-home jobs accepted them compared to only 27 percent who accepted women-only in-office jobs that were close to the participants' homes and child friendly. Even the office take-up is promising, Jalota explained, considering that all of the women were out of the workforce to start. In a two-year follow-up study, women who had accepted work-from-home jobs were more likely to work outside the home in the future.
More than 150 people attended the summit, which featured three dozen speakers, including Jalota; Stanford Professors Katherine Casey, faculty director of the King Center; Nicholas Bloom, Alessandra Voena, Susan Athey, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman; Hoover Institution Director of Research Steven J. Davis; former Indian cabinet minister Smriti Irani; Grameen Foundation Chief Executive Officer Zubaida Bai; and Mahindra Group USA President Lakshmanan Chidambaram, among others. Irani, India's former minister of women and child development, participated in a keynote Q&A with Jalota; Yale Professor Rohini Pande, who has worked on gender-inclusive development in rural India, also delivered a keynote address.
Casey opened the event with welcoming remarks, saying the Future of Work for Women Summit "embodies the spirit and ambition of the King Center," which seeks to improve the lives of people living in poverty.
Jalota says the summit has already led to tangible collaborations, including one between her organization and the Confederation of Indian Industry to study the costs and benefits of hiring and retaining women as compared to men.
Jalota says the goal is to convene the summit on a regular basis, perhaps annually or every other year. But the initiative will also include smaller in-country events that are focused on the needs of local economies, employers, and potential employees.
The potential benefits of increasing women's participation in the workforce are huge; according to data in the pre-summit report, companies in which women make up more than 30 percent of the executive team outperform those with fewer female leaders, and companies with gender diversity have lower turnover rates.
One initial hurdle when she first came up with the idea for the summit, Jalota says, was addressing a misconception that increasing women's labor force participation is a corporate social responsibility or DEI issue.
"These are not DEI or corporate social responsibility numbers," she says. "It's a mainstream problem, and it needs mainstream solutions."
